Rails 3 Engine & Static assets

Question

I\'m building an engine I\'ve bundled as a gem (gmaps4rails). I copied the /public of my engine in the /public of my rails app.

Everything works fine in development

Answer 1

In your engine, replace:

initializer "static assets" do |app|
  app.middleware.use ::ActionDispatch::Static, "#{root}/public"
end

with:

initializer "static assets" do |app|
      app.middleware.insert_before(::ActionDispatch::Static, ::ActionDispatch::Static, "#{root}/public")
end

Answer 2

I don't know much about the way, gems are packaged/made. But why can't you copy the images/js/css stuff of your gems public folder into the apps public folder? I just did that and it worked for me. Is that not the done thing?

Answer 3

For performance reason, static assets serving is disabled in production mode. Your webserver should be configured to serve theses assets.

Look at this discussion if your are using nginx as a webserver.

Answer 4

In Rails 3.x try to set this in config/environments/production.rb

config.serve_static_assets = true

By default Rails assumes you are using an assets server (lightttp, nginx or Apache)

Answer 5

I had a similar problem mounting a Rails 3.1 engine. I was receiving blank assets in stage and production.

I found a solution at http://jonswope.com/2010/07/25/rails-3-engines-plugins-and-static-assets/comment-page-1/#comment-87 and tweaked it to suit Rails 3.1 asset locations:

initializer "static assets" do |app|
  app.middleware.insert_before ::Rack::Lock, ::ActionDispatch::Static, "#{root}/app/assets"
end

I imagine there is a more elegant way but my effort today didn't yield anything substantial.

Answer 6

Have you tried adding this to your Rails::Engine class:

initializer "static assets" do |app|
  app.middleware.use ::ActionDispatch::Static, "#{root}/public"
end

This will merge in your Gem's /public directory with the app at runtime.